Shopfronts for Travel Creators
Role: Head of Product
Shopfronts gives travel creators a single home to curate all travel recommendations (hotels and experiences), and earn when their followers make a booking.
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Creators today hold undeniable influence on consumer spending across industries, especially travel. However they don’t have access to the tools needed to build a sustainable income, relying heavily on one-off, transactional brand deals.
Additionally, creator-led shopping has boomed in the last 2 years, with the introduction and growth of platforms like LTK, Instagram Shops and Amazon Inspire.
Travis wanted to design a platform empowering travel creators to earn from their content and expertise. As Head of Product, I led a team of 8 and worked closely with Design and Engineering from concept to launch within 6 months.
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[1] User Research
I designed and conducted user research - through 1-1 virtual sessions with 25 creators, and an online survey completed by 512 creators.
The objective was to identify their most pressing unmet needs and challenges in being financially sustainable as a creator, to inform the design of the Shopfronts.
A few insights emerged:
1 in 2 creators wanted to become full-time in 12 months, yet just 15% were monetizing regularly.
Creators are actively looking for new ways to monetize their content - not create more content.
Creators who have tried affiliate marketing platforms find them clunky and hard to use
There was a need for a simple way for creators to earn through travel content and expertise they already had.
[2] Design, Prototype & Build
I ran day-to-day roadmap prioritisation and in close alignment with Design, Engineering and Marketing.
Working with Design, we landed on 3 different design options for the Shopfront:
Shopping-led
Conversation-led
Personalization-led
Ultimately, the product was designed to empower creators to establish a new recurring, passive income stream, from existing content and reach. So we’ve decided on option 1 - Shopping-led. This includes enabling creators to:
⚡️ Search for brands to earn from
⚡️ Add hotels to Shopfront
⚡️ Share Shopfront via a single link
⚡️ Earn a commission when followers book
⚡️ Access Shopfront analytics
I worked hand-in-hand with designers and engineers to assess technical feasibility and constraints requiring design refinements.
[3] GTM & Optimisation Experiments
Worked with Marketing on product positioning, email sequences to drive adoption and re-engagment
Defined key metrics, implemented tracking and set up analytics dashboards to support weekly reporting
Ran optimisation experiments both via emails and in-product, to reduce drop-offs, increase number of hotels added per creator, creator sharing, consumer traffic and conversions
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Scaled Shopfronts from 0-4000 creators (10k-1M following) in US and UK
Power users by Creators who added 50-90 hotels within first week of use
Increased Creator Shopfront adoption by 360% and GMV by 549% in 6 months
Secured major partnership with Expedia Partner Solutions with top-tier commission rates across 1M properties globally
Details
1. Add Bookable Links to your Shopfront
Creators could add from 400k+ hotels globally - across major hotel groups (Accor, Hyatt, IHG) as well as more boutique properties
Creators earned 4-7% commission when a booking was made
Learning 1: How to scale up our hotel coverage quickly, in a way that was technically feasible and cost-effective. We tested an MVP where we only had 10k hotels available - however this made for a subpar creator experience and we had to go back to the drawing board to research, evaluate our technical options and negotiate with a new partner - this then brought on 400k+ hotels globally.
Learning 2: How to keep the creator user experience very quick and simple - adding a hotel could be done in less than 2 minutes! Compared to existing alternatives like travel affiliate platforms, this was a game-changer.
2) Discover hotels + integrated hotel booking
User feedback showed that creators wanted a more visual way to discover hotel brands that they could earn from. At the same time, consumers wanted a way to better see the room types available and comparative pricing within the app.
